Domain Issues

We've had some problems after the last update with Feedburner and Google. Essentially, Single-Sign-On broke, leaving the website in a quasi-inaccessible state (humans who waited long enough could access it, but bots would hit 20 302 redirects and give up). So, we had to move on.

After a night-long marathon of patching, we've moved from using the unsupported Multi-domain module to the Domain Access module. This gives us a viable upgrade path to Drupal 6 and 7. A lot of things changed on the back-end, but they're mostly for the better; for example, Single-Sign-On is no longer needed, so bots will no longer hit 20+ 302/301 redirects.

This patches a very strange security hole which popped up recently, where users are able to bypass the captcha input for one site, by submitting comments on another site. One spammer figured out that little trick and managed to flood the site with roughly 12,000 comments per day.

Domains are no longer a vocabulary - they're basically a sub-section of a node now. This gives us a much finer control over "who sees what" - we can now propagate articles across different domains, instead of the "all or nothing" approach we previously had. It also means that a lot of articles are as of yet unclassified, leaving them to sit on the front page of Geekstreak.com, instead of on their proper domain. We're working on sorting this problem out right now.

Beyond that, we're gearing up for a move to Drupal 6 by the end of the Summer. After that, we expect to be on Drupal 7 by the end of the year or early 2010 (or whenever it's ready).

That about wraps up this update. If you have anything to add/questions/bugs, leave a comment!